September 2009
The George and Dragon, Wentworth, South Yorkshire
This is a smashing little pub in an historic estate village (the estate in question belonging to the Wentworth family) but unfortunately whoever is responsible for the catering has decided to embrace the kind of pretentiousness that makes Polyanna's blood boil (and perfectly illustrates that fine word butter no parsnips). I make no attempt to reproduce the descriptions of the food (written up on blackboards above the bar) but if I say that someone had clearly decided to have a go at South Yorkshire 'fusion' it may give some indication of what was to come.
I had lunch here with a couple of friends, one of whom happened to be out celebrating his 90th birthday. Not having an enormous appetite, he passed on the starters but I decided I could manage a bowl of vegetable soup and his son could not resist the lure of wild mushrooms in a creamy sauce on toasted brioche. The soup came with some kind of dark brown slobber running in zigzags across the top, and was thick enough to use as wallpaper paste. Which it largely resembled. Or rather, wallpaper paste with salt in it. If I had been a vegetarian I would have worried about the dark brown stuff as well, but as it was, I just worried that I would have to eat some of the enormous bowlful, if only to show willing.
The wild mushrooms were said to be excellent. As we had waited over half an hour for them and the soup, I was glad, but Birthday Boy was ready to eat a scabby donkey by this time. When the mains finally came (and only after I pursued the waitress to ask where they were), we had been waiting for an hour and fifteen minutes and Son of Birthday Boy was driving and could not have another pint. Which was a problem as he had ordered pork medallions on Thai potato salad (no, seriously) with a sweet chilli sauce. And the chilli sauce was hot. Even the dragon would have thought it was hot. It was light-blue-touchpaper-and-retire hot. Which would have been nice to know for those who are of faint heart when it comes to chilli. What the potato salad idea was all about was a mystery, especially as the spuds in question were also hot (by which I mean not cold, as in 'salad').
BB had gammon and egg, which arrived with the egg sitting on top of "pea puree" which in turn completely covered the (gristly) piece of gammon. We had seen this on the menu and thought it was a joke, but someone in the kitchen must have had a warped sense of humour. There was a bowl of chips that would have fed St George for a week, even after a particularly hard stint of slaying.
My beer-battered fish was so ordinary that it made me wish I had opted for one of the other jokes on the blackboards, just to have a laugh, but by now we were all desperate to get home before Son of BB spontaneously combusted. We could not have ordered a pudding in any case, as we had not brought our pyjamas.
I wanted to go into the kitchen and say, "Look here, this is a pub. A pub, right? So whose idea is it to serve up fourth-rate restaurant food of the weirdest kind, and muck up pub standards like gammon and egg? Not to mention make the punters wait this length of time for it." But anyone who could devise that menu and put posh mushy peas under a fried egg has got to be too bonkers to approach, especially as there would have been sharp implements about.
The bill came to over fifty quid, with three glasses of wine, and two pints of beer.
Verdict: value for money - 3/10 service - 0/10 quality of food - 2/10 (for the mushrooms)
